


Light Up a Room

by shinychimera



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Female Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-24
Updated: 2011-05-24
Packaged: 2017-10-19 18:01:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/203696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinychimera/pseuds/shinychimera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Gaila arrives in the consulate on Earth, she has to learn to smile all over again. She’s doing it wrong, the helpful counselors tell her without telling her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Light Up a Room

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Yeomanrand](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yeomanrand/gifts).



> A response to the prompt: _Gaila: Seventeen words for love. One hundred for sex._

When Gaila arrives in the consulate on Earth, she has to learn to smile all over again. She’s doing it wrong, the helpful counselors tell her without telling her. In between the language classes where she tries to squeeze Orion’s multidimensional polysynthetic tonal language into the paltry million and a half words of Standard, she spends hours looking back and forth between her vid screen and her mirror, studying the subtleties of looking “happy” without looking “seductive”.

She thinks she’s got it all figured out by the time she is deemed ready to enroll in Starfleet Academy, but within fifteen minutes of saying hello, her new roommate Uhura is wrapping her brown hand around Gaila’s green and asking if anything is wrong. She’s amazingly swift at homing in on the root of the problem, the facial expressions that do not feel natural to her, no matter how often she practices them.

To her surprise, the girl does not try to point her at a mirror, or an image on a screen. Gaila’s not sure Uhura knows that the questions she asks about Orion life, language and love are very strange, very oblique, and very private, but she answers as honestly as she can. But she is utterly confused with what the questions have to do with smiling, until Uhura explains that the myriad countenances she learned as a child translate most easily to the hundred Orion words for “sex”. And then she tells Gaila with flabbergasting, stunning sincerity that the effortless smiles that she has been seeing every day, on every human face, are the freely given expression of the seventeen almost-never-spoken Orion words for “love”.

She is filled with astonishment and laughter and tears, and after that, she can’t help but love Uhura and the rest of them back, with all her soul.


End file.
